It is often said that Adam Smith, despite his
general belief in Laissez-faire, made an exception for education.
That is not entirely true. In the course of a lengthy and interesting
discussion, Smith argues both that education is a legitimate
government function, at least in some societies, and that it is a
function which governments perform very badly. His conclusion is that
while it is legitimate for government to subsidize education, it may
be more prudent to leave education entirely private.[2]

My purpose in this essay is to argue that Smith's
conjecture was correct. While government schooling,[3]
free and compulsory, is at present nearly universal in developed
societies, the case for it is unconvincing. There are arguments for
government provision of schooling, as there are arguments for
government provision of any good or service, but the arguments in
favor are weaker, and the arguments against stronger, than the
corresponding arguments for other goods and services that we
routinely leave to the private market.

The Arguments In Favor of Government
Schooling

The arguments in favor of government involvement
in schooling can be roughly divided into four groups: Externality
arguments, information arguments, capital market failure arguments,
and egalitarian arguments. I will deal with them in that
order.

Externality Arguments

The most common arguments for government schooling
involve the claim that it produces large positive externalities, that
by schooling my children I greatly benefit society as a whole, and
that it is therefore inappropriate to leave either the decision of
how to school them or the cost of doing so entirely to me. On further
analysis, this claim divides into three variants, one wrong and two
dubious.

The simplest version is the one that is wrong. It
is said that since education increases human productivity, by
educating my child I increase the wealth of the whole society, making
all of us better off. One obvious problem with this argument is that,
if correct, it applies to a lot of things other than education.
Physical capital also increases productivity; does it follow that all
investments ought to be subsidized? Better transportation allows
workers to spend more time working and less time commuting; should we
subsidize the production of cars? The argument suggests that
everything worth doing ought to be subsidized-leaving us with the
puzzle of what we are to tax in order to raise the money for the
subsidies.

What is wrong with this argument is that it misses
is the way in which the price system already allocates "social
benefits" to those who produce them. Building a factory may increase
the wealth of my society-but most (in the limit of perfect
competition, all) of the increase goes to the investors whose capital
paid for the factory. If I use a car instead of a bus to commute, the
savings in time is added either to my leisure or my income. If
education makes me a more productive worker, my income will be higher
as a result. That is why top law schools are able to sell schooling
to willing customers at a price of about twenty thousand dollars a
year.

Schooling-like a new car-produces non-market
benefits as well. But these too go mostly to the student, enabled by
education to appreciate more of the riches of the culture he lives
in. There may be effects on other people as well, but they are
typically small compared to the benefits to the student, and their
sign is not always clear. When my child becomes an expert in
Shakespeare and quantum mechanics one result may be to enlighten and
entertain her friends, but another may be to make them feel stupid.
In just the same way, the beauty of my new car may produce the
pleasures of aesthetic appreciation or the pains of envy in those who
watch me drive it down the street. To base the design of our
institutions for schooling on the uncertain effect on such third
parties rather than the direct effect on the schooled makes no more
sense than to base the design of cars on their value to everyone
except the owner.

There is, however, at least one important respect
in which my investment in education-or a factory-does produce
substantial external benefits. Even if my income fully reflects my
productivity, as it will tend to do in a market economy, not all of
my income goes to me. Some of it goes to the tax collector. It
follows that some investments, in factories or in people, may not get
made even though they are worth making, because the share of the
benefit that goes to the investor is not enough to pay the cost of
the investment. This inefficient failure to make some worthwhile
investments is one form of what economists call "excess burden"-the
cost of taxation above and beyond the amount collected.

There is a problem in trying to solve this
particular inefficiency by subsidizing investments. In order to pay a
subsidy one must collect a tax-and the additional tax increases
excess burden at the same time that the subsidy reduces it. Excess
burden is an argument against taxation, not for subsidy.

Another version of the externality arguments
locates the externality not in the increased economic productivity of
educated people but in their increased virtue. Both religious and
utilitarian variants of this justification for government schooling
were popular in the nineteenth century. Conservatives wanted to use
publicly controlled education to teach the masses religious virtue.
Many utilitarians, including Bentham himself, believed that while
freedom was a good thing in most contexts, it was necessary first to
teach people how to use their freedom-which is to say, to teach them
utilitarianism. A form of this argument which still remains popular
holds that uneducated people are particularly likely to become
criminals, justifying government schooling as a form of crime
control. While I have not yet heard anyone argue that government
schooling is needed to make the public ecologically responsible, to
properly train the crew of spaceship earth, it seems the obvious next
step in the evolution of the argument-considering what is actually
being taught to elementary school students in the more up to date
government schools.

The thesis has two versions-education and
indoctrination. The first assumes that crime and sin are the result
of ignorance rather than rational choice. The evidence for this
thesis is far from clear. As a general rule, criminals seem to
exhibit rational behavior in their crimes-little old ladies, for
example, get mugged a lot more often than football players. Criminals
who have been caught and imprisoned frequently return to a life of
crime-although that experience surely teaches them more about the
consequences of their actions than they are likely to learn in any
school. And, of course, even if ignorance is one source of crime, the
argument depends on the assumption that government schools are better
at dissipating ignorance than private ones. As we will see, both
theory and history provide reasons to doubt that.

The indoctrination version of the argument may
make somewhat more sense. In a private system, children will be
taught what their parents want them to know. In a government system,
children will be taught what the state wants them to know. So the
government system provides an opportunity for the state to
indoctrinate children in beliefs that it is not in their interest, or
their parents' interest, for them to hold. Insofar as some virtues
require one to act against one's own interest-for instance, by not
stealing something even when nobody is watching-that is an
opportunity to indoctrinate children in virtue.[4]

One good reply to this argument was made by
William Godwin, who, in 1796, expressed his hope "that mankind will
never have to learn so important a lesson through so corrupt a
channel." To put the argument in more modern language, government
schooling does indeed provide the state with an opportunity to
indoctrinate children-but there is no good reason to believe that it
will be in the interest of the state to indoctrinate them in beliefs
that it is in the interest of the rest of us for them to hold. Many
modern societies have strong legal rules designed to keep the state
from controlling what people believe-the first amendment to the U.S.
constitution being a notable example. It seems odd to combine them
with a set of institutions justified as doing the precise
opposite.

In an interesting recent article,[5]
John Lott explores the question of why schooling is controlled by the
state in modern societies. His conclusion is that government
schooling is a mechanism by which the state lowers the cost of
controlling the population. Part of his evidence is the organization
of modern government school systems-in particular the almost complete
absence of systems where parents choose the school and funding is
proportional to number of students, an arrangement which would put
pressure on the school to teach what the parents, rather than the
state, wanted. Part is a statistical analysis of data for a large
number of nations, designed to explore the relation between
government schooling and other characteristics of
government.

One final version of the externality argument is
the claim that my education provides benefits to others because it
makes me a more rational voter.[6]
While the argument is logically correct, its implications are
limited. It is perhaps best understood as an argument for subsidy,
not control. It is in my private interest to have a correct
understanding of the world around me, and such an understanding will
make me more able to evaluate government policy as well as more able
to make private decisions. The only argument for government control
is that it can force me to learn more about issues relevant to
voting, instead of issues relevant to private choice. The problem
with this is that the agency that does the controlling has its own
interest with regard to how I vote-which brings us back to the
indoctrination argument.

A second problem with the argument is that it
implicitly assumes that different voters have the same interest, so
that my rational voting benefits you as well as me. For some issues
this is no doubt true. But other issues-many of them in a modern
state, unfortunately-involve attempts by one group to benefit itself
at the expense of others. In such situations, your rational voting
may well make me worse off. Subsidizing education in how to use the
political system in one's own interest becomes the political
equivalent of subsidizing an arms race, and equally
unproductive.

A final problem is that the argument works only if
government run or government subsidized schools actually educate
better than private schools. If the costs of government control more
than cancel the benefits of government subsidy, the advantages of
educating students well provide no argument for having the state
educate them badly.

Externality arguments, not only for government
schooling but for many other issues as well, often make the mistake
of adding up only externalities with one sign-positive in the case of
schooling, negative in discussions of population or global
warming-while ignoring externalities with the opposite sign. The
result may be misleading, since it is the net externality that
provides an argument for government involvement. If my action
benefits one person by a dollar and injures someone else by two
dollars, that is an argument against subsidy, not for it.

What negative externalities might result from
schooling? One I have just mentioned-you may use your improved
education to more effectively pressure the government to benefit you
at my expense. A similar possibility exists for private transfers.
Ignorance may perhaps produce crime-but education produces more
competent criminals.

Another possibility is that schooling may produce
negative externalities because it is used in the competitive pursuit
of status.[7]
Consumption bundles of physical goods and services are not the only
thing that individuals care about. If one reason I wish more
schooling for myself or my children is so that I or they will have
more income or more degrees than my neighbor or his children, and if
my neighbor has similar tastes, then the gains of each come at the
other's expense.

I conclude that externality arguments provide
little independent support for government schooling. At most they
suggest that private schooling ought to receive some subsidy-and even
that conclusion is an uncertain one, given both the weaknesses of the
arguments for the existence of net positive externalities and the
difficulty of separating subsidy from control.

Information Arguments

Another argument is that government schooling is
necessary because parents, being themselves inadequately educated,
are incompetent to choose schooling for their children. As John
Stuart Mill put it, "The uncultivated cannot be competent judges of
cultivation." This argument concedes that government schools will
teach what the state wants children to learn instead of what their
parents want them to learn, but views that as an advantage of the
government system.

This argument seems to justify at most one
generation of government schooling. Once we educate the first
generation, they should then be competent to choose an education for
their children. The U.S. and Britain have now had universal
government schooling for at least five or six generations. If it has
done a good job of educating students it should now be unnecessary,
and if it has done a bad job perhaps we should try something
else.

A further problem with the argument is that most
of what the government schools actually teach-or, too often, fail to
teach-is well within the comprehension of virtually all parents.
Insofar as the main business of the schools is to teach children the
basic skills needed to function in our society, the children's
parents are usually competent to judge how good a job is being done.
Even a parent who cannot read can still tell whether his child can.
And, while a few educational issues may go beyond the parents'
competence to judge, parents qua parents, like parents qua taxpayers,
have the option of making use of other people's expert opinion. The
crucial difference between the two roles is that a parent deciding
what school his child shall go to has a far stronger incentive to
form as accurate an opinion as possible than does a parent deciding
how to vote.

Parents have one other advantage over educational
administrators-a flood of detailed free information. By observing
their children, and by listening to them, parents can learn a great
deal about how well they are being schooled. As West put it,
describing the situation in England in the 19th century, "Parents
were their own inspectors and, compared with official ones, they were
not only much more numerous but exercised continuous rather than
periodic check."[8]

Parental preferences have often clashed with
"expert educational opinion," but it has not always been the parents
who turned out to be in the wrong. Thus in Scotland, around 1800,
parents "Increasingly resisted traditional parochial school emphasis
on classical languages and Religion ...&nbsp; . Parents
complained that their children did not get their due in the school
`By not having been teached writing.' "[9]
Modern examples might include the controversies associated with the
shift away from phonics and towards the look-see approach to teaching
literacy and the introduction of the "new math" somewhat later-both
arguably among the causes of the massive decline in the output of the
American school system from 1960 to 1980. Parents have to live with
the results of educational experiments; the educators can always go
on to a new generation of experimental subjects. As Adam Smith put
it:

"Were there no public institutions for education,
no system, no science would be taught for which there was not some
demand; or which the circumstances of the times did not render it
either necessary, or convenient, or at least fashionable, to learn. A
private teacher could never find his account in teaching, either an
exploded and antiquated system of a science acknowledged to be
useful, or a science universally believed to be a mere useless and
pedantic heap of sophistry and nonsense. Such systems, such sciences,
can subsist no where, but in those incorporated societies for
education whose prosperity and revenue are in a great measure
independent of their reputation, and altogether independent of their
industry."[10]

In a striking passage, E.G. West hints that much
of the support for teaching children what they ought to know instead
of what their parents want them to know, in the past and presumably
today, depends on each expert assuming that it is his version of what
children ought to know that will win out:

"The French Physiocrats wanted a national system
of education because they could use it to propagate their new found
knowledge of the `secrets' of the workings of the economy. ...For the
nineteenth century cleric, the `ignorance' which led to crime was
primarily the ignorance of the teaching of his particular church. For
the utilitarian the crucial issue was ignorance of the laws of the
state or in other words the want of knowledge and effective warning
of the pain that would inevitably follow from certain actions. For
Malthus it was the ignorance of his population principle which
mattered most. Public education for him was needed to suppress the
`sophistries' of persons such as Condorcet. The latter happened to be
the successful instigator of French state education, and undoubtedly
intended it to instruct according to his conception of truth." West
(1975) p. 123.

Capital Market Failure

The special problems of investing in human capital
are sometimes offered as an argument for government intervention in
schooling. If I wish to borrow money to pay for a profitable
investment in building a factory, I can offer the factory as
collateral. If I wish to make a profitable investment in my own
education, I have no similar option. Under the present legal rules of
the U.S. and most advanced countries, I can acquire the education and
then wipe out the debt by declaring bankruptcy. So profitable
investments in human capital may fail to be made if the human in
question cannot finance them himself.

How important this argument is depends on whether
the unit of analysis is the individual or the family. If it is the
family, then the argument applies to only a small fraction of the
population. Most families can pay the cost of schooling their
children out of current income. Indeed, most families do pay the cost
of schooling their children out of current income-in the form of
taxes to support government schools. Such expenditures might be
harder for those with large families and low incomes than they are
now, and easier for those with small families and high incomes. On
the other hand, there is evidence that private schools provide a
given level of education at a considerably lower cost than government
schools. If so, most parents would face a lower burden under a
completely private system. The market failure argument would then
apply only to a small fraction of families at the bottom of the
income distribution.

So far as that part of the population is
concerned, several points are worth noting. The first is that it
makes very little sense to construct a government school system for
everyone in order to subsidize investments in human capital for a few
percent of the population. The second is that the present system does
a very bad job of educating just those people who would have the
hardest time educating themselves, which casts some doubt on the idea
that it is, for them, an improvement on a purely private system. The
third is that the evidence of the nineteenth century suggests that
even quite poor people are able to provide their children at least a
minimal education. British workers of the early nineteenth century
were very much poorer than the inhabitants of America's inner cities
at present. Yet the evidence suggests that most were able, without
government help, to buy enough education for their children to
provide at least minimal literacy-more than many inner city children
get now.

Additional issues arise if we consider the problem
from the standpoint of the child rather than the family. Most
families can afford to pay for schooling their children, but very few
children can afford to pay for schooling themselves. A private system
depends, for almost all children, on parents caring enough about the
welfare of their children to be willing to pay the cost of their
education.

Most parents, in most societies, do care for the
welfare of their children. In part this may be explained by altruism,
itself explainable on evolutionary grounds, and in part by the desire
of parents to have children capable of supporting them in their old
age. These incentives are not perfect-there are parents who sacrifice
the welfare of their children to their own welfare. But the
alternative to allowing parents to make decisions for their children
is not, as a general rule, having the decisions made by the
children-five year olds lack not only income, but information and
political power as well. The alternative to having a child's parents
make decisions for him is having other adults-school administrators,
politicians, voters-make those decisions. Parents may not always be
altruistic towards their children, but a child's parents are, of all
adults, the ones most likely to be. The argument against letting the
parents make the decision is an even stronger argument against
letting anyone else make it instead.

Here again, the empirical evidence is striking.
Under circumstances of poverty difficult for most of us to imagine,
British parents of the early 19th century managed to send almost all
of their children to school-not for as long as our children go to
school, but for long enough to acquire at least minimal skills. In
this country a century later, immigrant parents routinely sacrificed
themselves to promote the education of their children. We have yet to
see any similar level of altruism on the part of those who control
the government schools-say a teacher strike aimed at lowering teacher
wages in order to leave more money to pay for books.

The Egalitarian Argument

A final, and powerful, argument against an
entirely private system of schooling is that it promotes and
perpetuates inequality. Wealthier parents will spend more on their
children, making those children in turn better educated, more
successful, and wealthier. This effect is increased by the fact that
family background is itself a strong predictor of school performance,
even with equal levels of expenditure. In order to give a child from
a poor and badly educated family as a good an education as a child
from a rich and well educated family, it would, on average, be
necessary to spend substantially more on the former.[11]

There are at least two possible replies to that
argument. One is that our objective ought to be education, not
equality. If shifting to an entirely private system improves the
education of the bottom half of the income distribution a little and
the education of the top half a lot, both groups are better off.
Pursuing that line of argument would take me farther afield than I
intend to go in this essay.

A second reply is that while a completely private
system would indeed result in unequal educational accomplishment, so
does our present government system-and it is far from obvious which
leads to more inequality. At present, the quality of government
schools varies enormously and non-randomly from place to place. One
reason is that high income suburbs, on average, can and do spend more
on their schools than low income inner cities, although in the U.S.
this difference has probably decreased in recent years as a result of
legal pressures. A second reason is that the children of affluent and
well educated parents are, on the whole, easier to educate and to be
educated with than the children of the inner city poor. A third may
well be that affluent suburbanites are better than the inner city
poor at getting political institutions to act in their
interest.

The first two effects would still exist in an
entirely private system, but several factors might reduce the
inequality they now produce. A private system would be less rigidly
geographical than the present government system. Poor parents with
bright children who were willing to sacrifice for them, as many have
been in the past, would have the option of sending them to better
schools instead of being limited to the school district where they
happened to live. Such arrangements are technically possible in a
government system as well, and occasionally permitted, but not
often-perhaps because they transfer power from the schooling
bureaucracy to parents.

Another advantage of the private system, from the
standpoint of poor parents, is that parents could control what they
got without having to acquire political power-which poor people, as a
rule, have very little of. Subject to the limits of their income,
poor people have the same economic power as anyone else-the ability
to choose whom they buy from.

A final advantage is that a private system might
actually provide poor children with some education. Under our present
system, the largest determinant of educational output is family
background. One explanation of that is that parents are a major part
of their children's environment and thus a major source of their
education. But a second explanation may be that our schools do not do
a very good job of teaching, making children more dependant than they
need be on the education they get from those around them. If so, poor
children, who are in more need than rich children of things they
cannot get from their parents, might well benefit more from a general
improvement in the schools.

History

In many areas of human activity there are two
histories-the popular history, mostly mythological, and the real
history. In education, quite a lot of the real history has been
provided by E. G. West.[12]
In examining the history of the rise of government schooling in
Britain and the U.S., he has established several important points
which go far to refute the popular idea that mass education can exist
only through the intervention of the state. They are:

1. Schooling expenditure in Britain represented
about the same fraction of national income prior to government
intervention and compulsory schooling laws as it did after both were
introduced.

2. Prior to government involvement, almost all
children were going to school. The opposite claim, widely made in
Britain by the supporters of government involvement, was based on
fairly simple statistical errors. The most common was to calculate
how many children should be in school by picking an arbitrary and
unrealistic number of years of schooling and using it to calculate
how many children would be in school if all children went to school
for that number of years. The ratio of the number of children
actually in school to the calculated number was then treated as if it
was the fraction of children who went to school. In practice, as West
shows, more direct evidence suggests that almost all children in the
period just before the beginning of government involvement (c. 1830)
went to school for at least a few years. The discrepancy between
actual and calculated attendance mainly reflected actual school
attendance for fewer years than assumed in the
calculation.

A particularly striking example of this fallacy
was an unfavorable comparison of the British private system to the
Prussian state system, made by the Manchester Statistical Society in
1834. The authors assumed that British students attended school for
ten years, used that assumption to calculate that just under two
thirds of the children in Manchester attended school, and contrasted
that to the (claimed) hundred percent attendance rate of the Prussian
system. The Prussian system, however, provided for only seven years
of schooling-so even if the claim that every child got the full seven
years was true, the average years of schooling per child were about
the same in the two systems (7 in Prussia, about 6.5 in Manchester).
The Statistical Society offered no evidence that the British number
represented two thirds of the students attending school for ten years
each, and later evidence made it clear that it did not. The actual
number who never attended school seems, from slightly later studies,
to have been between one and three percent.

3. Attempts to measure educational output in the
form of literacy, using both a variety of studies at particular times
and a crude measure (percentage of grooms who signed their names when
they got married) that is available over a long time period, show no
significant effect of government intervention. So far as one can tell
by the (very imperfect) evidence, literacy was already rising rapidly
prior to the beginning of government subsidy. Most of the measured
increase in literacy had already occurred by the time a nationwide
system of government schools and compulsory attendance was
established.

4. The eventual expansion of the government school
system was in large part the result of efforts by the people running
it, plausibly explained by their own self-interest. Its main effect
was to replace, not to supplement, the pre-existing private
system.

The Voucher
Alternative

I have been considering two
alternatives-government and private schooling. Another alternative,
in some ways intermediate between the two, is for the state to
provide a fixed amount per pupil per year, which may be used to buy
schooling from any of a variety of private providers.[13]
How well does such a system deal with the problems we have
discussed?

A voucher system solves some of the problems
associated with market failure on the human capital market. Families
that are too poor to pay to send their children to school will be
able to use the voucher to pay for schooling. Parents who do not care
enough for their children to be willing to pay for their schooling
will be able to use vouchers to provide schooling for their children
at no cost to themselves. A voucher system might also reduce
educational inequality, relative to both government and private
systems. It would not, however, eliminate inequality, both because
parents would be free to supplement the voucher[14]
and because the parents themselves are a major input to the child's
education.

It is not clear whether a voucher system solves
any of the other problems raised by a purely private system. It is,
for example, a poor tool for solving inefficiencies associated with
positive externalities-supposing that one believes such externalities
exist and are substantial. With a voucher, the cost to the parents of
an additional dollar of schooling is zero up to the amount of the
voucher and one dollar above it. That means that parents who would in
any case spend more than the voucher will buy the same amount of
schooling with a voucher as with private schooling.[15]
If there are substantial net positive externalities, that amount will
be inefficiently low. Parents who would have spent less than the
amount of the voucher will now spend the full amount-which might buy
more or less than the efficient amount of schooling. A better way of
dealing with such externalities would be for the state to pay a
percentage of school expenses corresponding to the percentage of net
benefits that went to people other than the student and his family. A
voucher makes sense, from this standpoint, only if the optimal
educational expenditure is known and is about the same for all
families-which seems implausible.

While vouchers give the wrong pattern of
incentives for solving the externality problem, government schools do
still worse. A parent who wishes to give his child a thousand dollar
education when the government schools are spending only nine hundred
dollars per pupil must pay the full cost of sending his child to a
private school: a thousand dollar cost for a hundred dollars of
additional schooling.[16]
If the additional schooling is worth less than the additional cost,
the parent leaves his child in the public school, where he gets less
schooling than his parent would have bought for him in an entirely
private system. So a government system might result in less
expenditure on schooling than a completely private system-making the
inefficiency associated with the failure to allow for positive
externalities worse rather than better.

Whether a voucher answers the arguments of those
who believe that parents are incompetent to control their children's
schooling, either because they have the wrong objectives or because
they have the right objectives but not enough knowledge to achieve
them, depends on how much control the state exercises over schools
that accept vouchers. This suggests an important disadvantage of
vouchers. If the government is paying the piper, it may well choose
to call the tune. If it is giving vouchers to pay for education, it
will probably want to determine what counts as education. Thus a
voucher system, like a government school system, has the potential to
be used either to encourage indoctrination or to redirect
"educational expenditure" to benefit politically well organized
groups such as school teachers and administrators. While one could
design a voucher system to minimize such problems, perhaps by
permitting schools to qualify if the mean performance of their
students on objective exams matched the mean performance of students
at government run schools, it is far from clear that such a system
could be either passed or maintained.

A second argument against vouchers is that they
may encourage wasteful expenditure on schooling. During the two
decades when the performance of U.S. schools, measured by objective
exams, plumetted, real expenditure per pupil roughly doubled. Under a
voucher system, interest groups selling inputs to schooling-textbook
publishers, teacher's unions, and the like -have an incentive to
lobby to raise the amount of the voucher above the optimal level of
school expenditure. While their ability to divert such expenditures
to themselves will be limited by quality competition among the
schools, an increase in demand for their product will still tend to
raise its price.

Conclusion

There are arguments in favor of having government
pay for and produce schooling, as there are arguments in favor of
having government pay for and produce practically any good or
service. I have tried to show that the arguments in the case of
schooling are not very strong. There are also arguments against
having government produce and pay for any good-the arguments for
political failure combined with the general economic argument that
private markets tend, at least in some approximation, to produce the
optimal output at the minimal cost. In the case of schooling, there
are additional and very powerful arguments against government
control. One of the most important is its potential use to
indoctrinate the population in views that the government, or the
schooling bureaucracy, or powerful lobbying groups, wish people to
hold.

In this regard, one of the great disadvantages of
government schooling is its uniformity. Any education can be viewed
as indoctrination from the standpoint of those who do not believe
what is being taught. Under a private system, however, there is no
single orthodoxy. Different children are taught different things,
reflecting the differing preferences of their parents and, to a
lesser degree, the beliefs of teachers, textbook authors, and other
contributers to the educational process. As adults, the graduates of
such schools have the opportunity to correct the deficiencies in
their education by interacting with the graduates of other schools
who have been taught very different things. Under a government
system, there is a serious risk that one official orthodoxy will be
taught to all.

A further disadvantage to state education,
especially in a diverse society, is that it inevitably involves a
state religion. One cannot educate children without talking about
issues on which religions differ. The pretence of a religiously
neutral education, at least in the U.S., is maintained mainly by the
tendency of teachers, like other people, to regard what they believe
in as fact and only what other people believe in as religion. A
government school system in a diverse society is thus deeply
divisive, since it means that some people's children are being
indoctrinated with other people's religion.

Many of the disadvantages of government schooling
could be eliminated, or at least reduced, by a voucher system. While
such a system would be a great improvement over government schooling,
there seems little reason to believe that it would be superior to an
entirely private system. The great argument against it is that a
voucher system must include some definition of what is or is not
schooling, in order to determine what can be paid for with the
voucher. Imposing such a definition on private schools implies the
same sorts of problems of government control that would arise with a
government school system, although possibly to a much reduced
degree.

I conclude that Adam Smith was correct in his
suggestion. Whether or not it is proper to have a government system
of schooling, it is prudent not to.

David Friedman

July 7, 1993

This paper was delivered at a regional meeting of
the Mont Pelerin Society and later published in
Liberty.